A Snapple commercial has come between filmmaker Spike Lee and the University.
Lee, who was scheduled to speak in Page Auditorium on March 6, has been detained in San Diego, where a shoot of a Snapple commercial that he is directing has taken longer than expected, said Melinda Bolger, program coordinator in the Office of University Life and adviser to the University Union, whose Interaction Committee was the main sponsor of the event.
While Lee was scheduled to shoot the commercial before he set the March 6 date to speak, Bolger said she was told that the commercial would be done in time and would not present a conflict. Lee was supposed to leave San Diego this morning.
Bolger and Trinity sophomore Nicole Kelly, chair of the Interaction Committee, were not given a reason for Lee's cancellation until Monday. On Friday afternoon, Kelly received a message from Lee's agent saying that he would not be able to make the March 6 date, but the message did not give any explanation.
This marks the second time in a month that Lee has had to back out of a speaking engagement at the University on relatively short notice. He was forced to cancel his original booking for Feb. 17 only two days before, due to the fact that his personal assistant, who left the company shortly after, double-booked him. The assistant had also scheduled him for a three-day commercial shoot in Orlando that weekend.
Greg Sneed, president of Lee's production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, said that it is "of course" difficult to book Lee for college lectures due to the nature of his work.
"His first priority is making films, and his second priority is that he likes directing videos and commercials," Sneed said. "These are his business commitments and they're how he gets paid and how he advances his craft. Also, colleges usually want to book speakers two, three, four months in advance, while producers for commercials will call the week before they want to shoot and ask if Spike wants to direct."
Bolger and Kelly both said that they have not experienced comparable difficulties in booking speakers or other talent in the past. "Sure, this has happened before," Kelly said, "but not twice in two weeks."
Flip Porter, an agent for southeastern colleges at the American Program Bureau who worked to get Lee to appear at the University, said that he has booked Lee many times, but this has been his most difficult scheduling experience with the filmmaker.
"The people in the entertainment industry have the most fluid schedules," Porter said. "Lecture dates are not their main vocation, so to book someone like Spike or Oliver Stone is not easy. But Spike is very much protective of his image, and he knows that bad press on him reflects on whether people will go see his movies. I'm sure Spike and his office are very sorry." Lee also had to back out on a speaking engagement at Quinnipac College in Connecticut due to the Snapple shoot.
The Union has no plans to try to reschedule Lee's visit a third time this semester, and Sneed said it would be impossible to engage him for a lecture before May. The fall semester may be a possibility, Bolger said, but she added that such a decision would be made by next year's Interaction Committee.
"We're just disappointed," Bolger said, "and we had every reason to believe he would be here. We had signed contracts."
Bolger is working with 40 Acres and a Mule to seek reimbursement for the costs the Union already spent on organizing the event, such as publicity expenses and catering for the dinner planned before Lee's speech and the reception afterward.
"We need to get some documentation to them. I think we'll certainly get some if not all [of the money reimbursed]," she said. Sneed said that he thinks it "reasonable" for the University to ask for restitution, although Porter said that it is usually not customary for colleges to receive reimbursement in such situations.
"In this case, the fault was totally on Spike," Porter said. "If it was an act-of-God situation, like weather or a plane crash, the school would have to forfeit those costs."
Kelly said the Interaction Committee is pursuing a few possibilities to bring a speaker of a smaller stature to campus this semester to address the same issue-multiculturalism-that Lee would have addressed. Lee's speaking fee of $11,500 had been subsidized by a number of campus groups, but the committee had allocated $4,000 of its budget for the event.
"We'd really like to direct the money into other programming by the end of the year," she said. "I'm disappointed that [Lee] can't come, but I don't want to direct my energy into any negative feelings. The committee just wants to do as much as it can for the rest of the semester."
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